


Step, Falter, Turn

by ThrillingDetectiveTales



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Fluff, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-28 21:42:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20071042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThrillingDetectiveTales/pseuds/ThrillingDetectiveTales
Summary: When he sees how badly Buck is struggling in the wake of his triumphant return to Easy Company, Dick doesn’t know what to say to comfort the other man. He tries his best anyway.





	Step, Falter, Turn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [agnesgrey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/agnesgrey/gifts).

> I’m technically a day late with this bad boy, but I wanted to get at least one more fill done for the **Easy Co Troopers** Rarepair Meme so I’m posting it anyway.
> 
> For **Kore,** whose prompt was: “Poor Buck is way out there in the weeds during that movie scene ("Gotta penny?") and it seems like Dick doesn't quite know how to reassure or comfort him as they're leaving....OR DOES HE.”
> 
> (He does, Kore. He does. ...sort of.)
> 
> The lovely **Arwen88** gave it a quick speed read but it hasn’t been officially betaed. Let me know if you spot any glaring inconsistencies, though I can’t promise I’ll fix them unless absolutely necessary.
> 
> Kore, I hope it’s even a little of what you were expecting from your prompt!

Luz was up to his usual shenanigans by the time Dick finally managed to sneak away from the mountains of paperwork awarded in conjunction with his promotion to battalion XO and escape to the drafty gymnasium that had been designated as the entertainment hall here in Mourmelon-le-Grand. While it was admittedly somewhat lacking in comparison to the officers’ clubs back stateside—particularly those that had been newly constructed in the style of the old Spanish Mission on some picturesque cliffside overlooking the balmy blue waters of the Pacific where they rolled out from the gilded edge of the California coast, about which Nix liked to go on at excessively maudlin length whenever he was denied adequate company of an evening—Dick found the place almost cozy.

It was halfway to warm, with so many bodies pressed together, and the sweet, musty scent that thickened the air reminded Dick vaguely of the summer produce markets back home when he was a child, walking the crowded aisles in search of a wayward slice of shoofly pie or a freshly fried stroopwafel while his mother made the rounds to pad their pantry from the smorgasbord the farmers had hauled in fresh from the fields. At the front of the makeshift theater, Luz had tired of his startlingly accurate John Wayne impression and taken to dramatically invoking Marlene Dietrich’s sultry purr, repeating her zinging response for the third or fourth time before she’d even managed to deliver the line on-screen herself. Dick’s eyebrows leapt upward when Lipton, of all people, wheeled around in his seat to glower Luz into submission with Toye at his shoulder. 

Dick silently debated the wisdom of intervening. On the one hand, a Luz with a surfeit of energy was a Luz who could use a good throttling, if only to burn off a little of the excess; on the other, Dick needed his men to be fighting fit at the drop of a hat, and that included those uniquely possessed of the talent to stir another man to the point of violence simply by existing in the same space. Luz couldn’t very well fall in with the rest of the company if he was trapped in a headlock when Easy was next called into action. Of course, Lipton wouldn’t do any serious damage—even at his most frustrated he was markedly more reserved than the majority of the men in the company, occasionally even outperforming Dick himself in matters of general unflappability. 

Toye, however, might. It was hard to tell with him. He could be staring you down one moment because he was casually compiling a list of all the places he’d like to get a knife into you and politely begging a cigarette in the next while he nodded along to your nostalgic ruminations on all the little things you missed from back home. Not that Dick had any practical experience with either, though he had seen Toye at both often enough with Bill Guarnere to recognize the subtle nuances in his expression. The way he was glaring at Luz now, Dick guessed that they were a few short minutes out from the delivery of a punishing right cross.

He was about to step forward when a flash of white caught his eye, moving in the dark like a specter. He blinked, squinting past the glare of the projector, and was pleased to recognize the back of Buck Compton’s head in a seat just off the center aisle, a few rows back from the front. Buck had been shipped back out to Easy when his wounds were determined not to be of the million dollar school and had healed enough to grant him the return of a certain amount of mobility, but Dick hadn’t had a moment to really catch up with him since he’d strolled into Dick’s office with a haphazardly folded piece of transfer paperwork and a familiar grin.

Dick glanced back over to where Lipton was quietly berating Luz for his behavior—while Luz slouched back in his seat, raising his eyebrows and licking his lips and generally embodying the character of a man who was decidedly unconcerned about ruining somebody else’s movie-going experience—and promptly decided that Lipton had the matter well in hand. He felt a little selfish, but it was probably better that he let his sergeants discipline the men by their own metrics, anyway. He had never made a habit of hovering before and to do so in the wake of his promotion, conflicted about it as he may be, would surely seem the worst kind of arrogance. Besides, he reasoned, he was responsible for the whole of Easy Company, now, not only its first platoon, and he would be remiss in his duties if he didn’t evaluate his soldiers personally before he sent them back out into the field.

_Oh sure,_ said a voice in his head that sounded suspiciously like Nix. Most of the internal dialogue that encouraged Dick to veer outside the bounds of respectable behavior—or teased him relentlessly for manifesting the desire to do so all on his own—sounded like Nix. _It has nothing at all to do with the fact that you used to go together before he got wounded._

While it was true that a man of Dick’s proclivities was not especially spoiled for choice on the front lines of the Allied advance, he maintained that he had regretted losing Buck for far more than his intimate companionship. Buck was a good soldier and a good man and it had been hard on the company to see an officer of his caliber nearly abandoned to enemy forces but for the good graces of an appropriated barn door.

He slipped into the seat behind Buck with little fanfare and ventured a joke about the number of wounds the first lieutenant had managed to incur off of a single lucky shot from a Kraut defender. Dick didn’t flatter himself a comedian, but when Buck didn’t respond at all he thought maybe the other man hadn’t heard him. He tried again, and then, faint exasperation giving way to real concern when Buck likewise ignored this overture, said sharply, “Buck?”

Buck turned, looking almost dazed, pale eyes wide and blank in his blanched face. He made a soft, inquisitive sound of recognition when he saw that it was Dick murmuring questions at his back and Dick repeated, “How is it?”

Buck’s brow furrowed shallowly with vague confusion and Dick nodded to the screen in front of them, prompting.

“Oh,” Buck provided, blinking a few times and peering about like he was only just now realizing that he was tucked into a dark hall with fifty other men; a reaction that did not bode especially well in regards to Dick’s responsibility to ensure the combat readiness of every man he sent into the field. “Uh, yeah. It’s a real corker.”

“Yeah,” Dick agreed, watching Buck curiously as he turned back around.

He was holding his entire body taut and stiff, tucked into itself like it pained him to let his limbs wander too far from his torso. It was a stark and troubling contrast to the Buck Compton that Dick had met back in Aldbourne, and had been so relieved to see in Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, with his expansive gestures and easy, tactile nature. 

That Buck Compton had slung an arm around Dick’s shoulders with little concern for propriety when he’d caught him on the way back to his billet and towed him off to the privacy of a nearby storage shed where they might steal a moment together, keeping up a loud and affable dialogue the whole while. This Buck Compton looked like he might shatter like so much toppled porcelain if Dick made a similar overture now, and not least because Dick’s capability as an engaging conversationalist only extended so far.

His speculation was interrupted a few short moments later, when General Taylor marched into the hall with a few staff officers dogging his heels and stopped the movie to deliver the news that the 506th would be shipping out promptly to prevent German progress in the Ardennes. Dick was thinly disappointed but not especially surprised by this news, having been warned by Nix earlier in the evening that he might not want to get too comfortable, though there had been nothing but rumor and scuttlebutt to lend credence to Nix’s suspicions at the time.

The men roused themselves with a chorus of bad-tempered grumbling, for which Dick found he couldn’t especially fault them. He was in no great hurry to march back out into the frigid winter wastes, himself, although he would do so without complaint—it wouldn’t do any favors to morale to have a commanding officer moaning about his unfortunate circumstances like a homesick private. The room cleared in short order but for himself and Buck, who was staring blearily toward the small raised stage at the front of the room with an attention that suggested the movie might still be playing, for all that he had noticed the interruption or cared.

Dick stood and said his name again and Buck finally stirred, turning with that same muzzy slowness and seeming distantly surprised to find Dick looming over him in an abandoned gymnasium in northern France. Dick nodded to him and Buck returned the gesture, a little of the harrowing blankness blanketing his features seeming to lift and clear. He appeared even more ghostly under the overhead lights, skin sallow and thin, the hollows of his eyes shaded a dark and worrying gray.

Dick wanted to ask if he was alright, but the answer seemed fairly obvious. So few of them were, this many months into the fighting, and Buck had spent half that time tucked onto a cot alongside a whole slew of men in various states of bloody disrepair, which could hardly be a pleasant or particularly revitalizing experience. Dick turned and started moving toward the door, grateful down to his bones when Buck rose to his feet without further goading, though it took him a moment to fall into step at Dick’s back.

_I ought to stop,_ Dick thought, and pressed his lips shut tight around the question that wanted so badly to spill forth past his teeth. _I ought to ask him, anyway._

It wasn’t the done thing, to acknowledge the horrors they carried with them, yoked like any beast of burden with the weight of all they had seen and done in the name of virtue—especially not when they were gearing up to wade right back out into that same miserable mire and spill yet more blood on the U.S. Army’s behalf—but it was clear to see that Buck had already started splintering under the pressure and God knew how many more straws they might incur over the course of this next campaign. What sort of leader would Dick be if he stood idly by and let this be the one that broke him? Dick didn’t want to lose any men, if he had his way about it, but he especially hated the thought of losing one to an enemy he could actively ward against, for once.

Just before they reached the door, he stopped, so suddenly that Buck walked right into his back. His hand came up to curl over Dick’s shoulder for a spare second, steadying himself, and as it fell away, he asked curiously, “Dick?”

“Sorry,” Dick said, and turned. Buck was frowning at him, eyes still wide with that faint, haunted wariness, and all strung through right down to his boots with tension like a steel cable. Dick considered him for a long second and sighed, “Buck, are you - ”

Buck cut his gaze away, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, and Dick caught the tail-end of the question with his teeth. That tension seemed to roll off him like a fog, enshrouding them both in its aching, buzzing stillness. Buck swallowed thickly, cheeks sheening a sickly, fevered pink as his gray face flushed through with shame. Dick felt a similar knot squirm miserably in the pit of his stomach.

He opened his mouth again but couldn’t summon an avenue by which to make the inquiry he wanted to make without dragging Buck’s pride directly into the line of fire along with it, a wound from which he was suddenly, terribly certain the other man would not recover. They stood there for a few long, awful seconds, Dick staring at Buck while Buck stared at the floor, and then Dick choked a low, frustrated sound out from behind his sternum and darted a hand out to tangle Buck’s fingers with his own, Dick’s left hand to Buck’s right, back to back with their palms toward the floor.

Buck’s skin was clammy and his fingers were cold, a subtle tremor shivering steadily through him where his knuckles caught against Dick’s. Dick squeezed, gently, and licked his lips, throat gone dry.

“Alright?” he croaked, raising his eyebrows and pinning his gaze hopefully to Buck’s face.

Buck took a long, slow breath through his nose, gaze jumping first to their hands, fingers threaded together, and then to Dick’s shoulder, and then up to meet Dick’s own. His mouth fell open just enough to reveal a shadowed sliver of teeth past the chapped pink cushion of his lips. He took another careful breath and let it out in a long, shuddering sigh. The fraught tension corded through his frame seemed to dissolve with it, sloughing off like so much early morning mist under the sun while his shoulders dropped back to their natural slope, broad and easy and open. He curled his fingers in toward his palm, pulling tight against Dick’s where they were nestled together, and nodded once, a shallow duck of his chin.

“Alright,” he echoed, and dragged the callused pad of his thumb around the heel of Dick’s hand, running it up to the knuckle and back down again. He sighed again, a warm tone of contentment softening the harsh rush. “Alright.” He looked back down at their entwined fingers, studying them for a long, thoughtful moment. Dick squeezed again, fond and relieved, and Buck mimicked the gesture and let him go. 

“Say,” he asked, mouth tilting up into that grin Dick had missed so sorely and stepping up so they were standing shoulder to shoulder, elbows brushing through the thin cotton of their field jackets. He was still paler than normal but Dick was willing to accept even this wan shade of Buck’s usual humor as an unequivocal victory. “You haven’t seen a spare coat lying around, have you?”

“I’m sure we can scare something up,” Dick replied with a smirk. “Why, you going on some kind of trip?”

“I’m breaking for Belgium,” Buck confirmed, halfway to rolling his eyes at Dick’s poor attempt at humor. “I hear it’s positively Antarctic at this time of year.”

Dick hummed his acknowledgment and pulled the door open, pressing in nearer to the heat of Buck at his side as an icy gust of wind cascaded over them both.

“Ought to’ve saved your vacation for the summer,” he supplied ruefully. “Didn’t you hear there’s a war on?” And damned if it didn’t cut the gale right in half to hear Buck laugh out into the night, warm and close and alive.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
